@lisko@sopuli.xyz’s comment is not visible at all on the Lemmy instance while to me my comment is not visible at all on the Beehaw instance, nothing is showing in modlog though so I assume it has not been removed.
Am I unaware of a mechanic of federation occurring here? Or is something bugged?
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Right. I didn’t understand that. So that particular entry is them banning me from asklemmy specifically solely on their instance. So, for example, if they hadn’t banned me on their entire instance and that action was all that was taken then this response I made in asklemmy would only be visible to Lemmy.ml users but would be completely invisible to Beehaw users: https://lemmy.ml/post/443569/comment/263836
This is very confusing behaviour. And it is extremely easy to weaponise it in the reddit-clone format without several checks on how federation powers are actually used by instance owners. Everyone on Beehaw seeing that post from Beehaw is not actually getting all of the responses to that Lemmy post, they’re getting one curated by the admins of Beehaw.
This could be avoided by visibly displaying the total number of comments that an instance is hiding. “This thread has 23 comments, only 18 are being displayed by this federation.” This would at least tell users of an instance that they are not getting a full picture, right now it’s unclear and very easy to weaponise it to perform ideologically motivated curation without people even knowing that they are having comments hidden from them.
There is no hiding, the comments are completely blocked from federating. Effectively, they dont exist for that instance. And its always the case that admins have full control over their instance, the technology dictates this.
Oh and another thought that has just come to mind when it comes to targeted defederating of individuals, and not indicating to those people that they’ve been banned in this way.
When I made this comment about child pornography, I was already defederated by this instance.
Someone however upvoted that comment, so presumably they agreed. Does that person know I was defederated from that instance though? Or do they think that the Beehaw people could see that comment? Seeing a comment from one instance that you think other instances can see will cause people to upvote that comment instead of writing a comment of their own saying the same thing.
If I hadn’t commented at all, that upvoter may have written their own thing saying something similar to what I said but with visibility to the Beehaw people. But instead none of them saw that point, and are left with absolutely no counter-narrative to the idea of making CHILD PORN with AI and that being topic being even remotely up for fucking debate.
Upvotes/downvotes actively reduce repetitive content, making people upvote a comment that they agree with instead of saying the same thing. If they don’t know that comment is only visible on a specific instance and isn’t visible in instances that they might want to counter a point on, they won’t comment. Suppression of opposition occurs and has knock on effects in this way.
Right but as I said down here, that feels bad.
It’s inherently confusing. You think you’re posting to a “community” not to a copy of a post from a different community on another community, with the potential for any replies to that copy to be a completely and utterly pointless waste of time because they won’t actually be seen outside your own instance as the other instance has silently defederated you as an individual for actions you performed completely outside their instance in a completely different one.
This is functionally much worse than reddit. It’s quite difficult for an educated tech-literate person to wrap their head around, not impossible but it’s still quite mind-bending. If that’s the case it will be VERY confusing and impenetrable behaviour for a person less literate in these things. I don’t know about whether you’ve done much reddit modding nutomic, I don’t know much about you, but I do know Dessalines has because I’ve shared modteams with them and this mechanic is VERY abuseable by any instances that want to weaponise.
It’s quite noticeable in the small ecosystem when this stuff is occurring, with modlogs that don’t have many actions. That will not be the case in a larger federation of many instances. The larger the federation the more dangerous many of these mechanics become. The ability this gives one instance to participate in political discourse within a federation while actively shutting down the ability of specific instances participating is a large problem. If this project was started to begin with to prevent leftists from being deplatformed then this mechanic undermines that goal completely, I hate saying it but in the longterm this would develop into something that results in much more censorship of the left than currently exists on reddit and that to me seems like the opposite of the original goal of the project. I am concerned.
Lemmy is not Reddit, and it works differently. If you dont like it, you can go back there.
I… Don’t think that’s a helpful response? Weren’t users on this instance recently banned for saying “fuck off” and chastised as behaviour that instance owners should not be doing? This is functionally saying the same thing. Not that I support tone policing but it’s weirdly inconsistent with that stance.
I want Lemmy to succeed because I agreed with the principle that the left is getting deplatformed by corporate owners and, as such, would be better able to spread its wings if corporate owners were not the guardians of this social media.
The structure and mechanics of lemmy right now though lead to a longterm outcome that is worse for the left because it is in fact far more possible for rogue actors to succeed. I’m trying to constructively communicate that concern to you and “go back to reddit” makes it sound like you’re not listening or not willing to listen to the concern.
This is how I see this mechanic playing out in the longterm:
The reason I raise it is because the development of this problem will go like this:
Early on instances might be able to stop this malicious behaviour by not being so naive and instance owners demanding that other instance owners not play these games of fuckery with the mechanic. A mindset like with the federation council could develop but in an unwritten code sort of way for best-practice administration. Right now that’s not happening though and the wrecker instances are clearly wreaking havoc, most of the active users of lemmy can see it, all of lemmygrad can see it, and it’s even being recognised by hexbear users who are generally not currently cross-pollinating in the ecosystem but do discuss its issues. Some people with the ability to stop it are being blunderingly naive about the intentions of others and the behaviour occurring.
Assuming this does get under control and resolved early on because federated instances get their act together about this malicious behaviour. Growth happens and things go reasonably fine for quite a while.
A certain size threshold is reached where this approach of instance owners all knowing the history of Lemmy and being aware of its abuses starts to go away, too many instance owners exist for instance owners to all be collectively well educated on it all or to know one another, keeping people up to speed on best practices to avoid wrecker stuff and political and ideological manipulation becomes impossible.
Wrecker instances start to make a comeback and become a serious problem. Development realises that this isn’t going to work out and something needs to be done with the mechanics or the vision of the project will be bad in a “oh god it was harder for leftists to be deplatformed on reddit” kind of way.
5a. Mechanics get changed. MASSIVE outrage is incited at the change by the wrecker instances. They successfully manage to make several other naive liberal non-political instances believe them and join in on their shit. Absolutely huge shitshow ensues that turns into some really nasty stuff with the demand that the mechanic be returned and that features that previously existed shouldn’t be taken away. This becomes a real real problem at scale. Copycat projects spring up with dubious origins as an “alternative to lemmy”, exoduses are incited.
5b. Mechanics do not get changed. This ecosystem becomes a playground for ideological manipulation of content in a way that is completely invisible to users. Every single instance starts using the blocking tactics that are currently employed on twitter, but in a federated and complex way that causes enormous issues in this format.
Do you think I’m analysing this wrong? Genuine question. Is this not how you see it playing out and you see something else? What do you see playing out in the longterm with these mechanics?
Sorry but I dont have time to read all your ramblings.
Man nutomic I don’t know why you’re being like this. These are pretty fair concerns and we really should be hashing out theory of the future problems that will be faced as the population of users grows. I’ve been doing this online community lark for a very long time and have led communities from tens to hundreds up to millions of participants. I’ve done this in both hobbies like gaming and writing, I’ve done this professionally as a job in gaming itself (though I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone), and I’ve done this in political communities as well. On different platforms (going all the way back to usenet) you get different unique problems for the platform, created by the mechanics of the platform, and these problems manifest themselves completely differently at different quantities of users because there are different levels of engagement and personalness that can be achieved by those attempting to marshal their communities over the course of their growth.
All of this stuff is absolutely worth theorycrafting and trying to get ahead of. I genuinely do not know why you are being hostile to me about it? Please explain what I did wrong here to inspire this attitude? I would like to avoid upsetting you in future.
I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth, but I think the problem is that you’re trying to debate what federation is. Do people control the content on their own instances or an instance you federate with control what they put on your server? To someone in the code these questions are not a philosophical debate of the future of federation. They are the essential misunderstanding of what federation means. That is something they have likely had to explain so many times it hurts. They might also be a human with other things happening in their life that have absolutely nothing to do with this post or even lemmy at all. I think it is worth remembering that we have no right to a person’s time or engagement.
Should it work differently? Maybe, but that would mean changing the definition of federation. To someone developing within a fixed model of federation what you are actually asking is to start over, redraw the map, design a new system from scratch. It might be worthwhile, but it is outside the scope of the project they have taken on. Lemmy is going to work the way it does because it is following a model that works that way. The model you describe doesn’t exist yet.
Here’s your opportunity. You can create that model. If you believe it is better maybe others will rally to it. Can you outline precisely who has control of what data on each server? Can you explain how a person or group hosting an instance can satisfy their moral and legal obligations under your system of ‘federation’?
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